


META: What is Kylo's Story?

by rexluscus



Series: Rex's Star Wars Meta [6]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Finn/Rey - Freeform, Kylo Ren/Rey - Freeform, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 11:23:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16911969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: Several essays about Kylo and other characters inThe Last Jedi.





	1. Rey’s and Kylo’s Two Stories

**Author's Note:**

> This essay alludes to both Kylo/Rey and Finn/Rey.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How Rey's and Kylo's stories relate to each other in _The Last Jedi_.

TLJ isn’t about Rey trying and failing to redeem Ben Solo. It’s more reciprocal than that. Rey and Kylo both make the same mistake: they each try to make the other into a supporting character in their own story.

In fact, the whole movie is about casting people in roles they didn’t audition for. Luke doesn’t want to play the Jedi savior Rey and the Resistance want. Finn doesn’t think he’s the Resistance hero Rose thinks he is. Luke and Finn end up stepping into those roles, to an extent, but their conviction that these roles suit them comes from within, not from the imaginations of other people. Nobody forces them to be who they’re not. And in the end, they all agree that they’re part of the same story, a story larger than themselves.

Rey and Kylo are the flip side of that. They  _want_  to be in the same story, but they don’t agree on what that story is. Kylo thinks he knows  _exactly_ what the story is and what role he plays: it’s the one where the mighty Skywalker scion destroys everyone who ever hurt him and rules the galaxy unchallenged. He seizes on Rey, in part, because Rey thinks she’s story- _less_ \- or rather, she knows she’s  _in_ one but doesn’t yet know what part she should play. Kylo sees that and says, “ _I_ have a part for you. You’ll matter to this story because you’ll matter to  _me._ Because this story is all about  _me._ ” He’s so convinced he  _knows the story_ that he can’t imagine why she would ever reject the role he’s chosen for her.

But Rey is in a different story, one in which the Jedi return to save the Resistance. Kylo of course is the main adversary in that story. But as soon as Rey learns Ben didn’t just “go bad” and that Luke didsomething to  _create_ Kylo Ren, she’s like, “oh I know exactly what my part is now. I’m the one who saves the Resistance by rescuing Ben Solo from his error, thus destroying our greatest enemy  _and_  gaining us the mighty Skywalker ally who will turn the tide.” Rey’s fantasy isn’t just that Ben will turn, it’s that  _she will be the one to turn him_. She’ll finally play the part she was meant to play.

Of course, Kylo doesn’t want to be destroyed. And Rey doesn’t either, which is really what Kylo proposes when he offers her an identity that depends solely on  _him._

So Rey and Kylo spend the movie trying to force each other into these supporting parts in the stories they’ve imagined for themselves. They both see the Force connection as an opportunity to do that, a  _sign from the story itself_ that their fantasies of each other are true. Each proceeds earnestly in their belief that their version of the story is right - they never lie or try to trick each other, they just talk  _past_ each other, each having one conversation while the other has another.

When they finally discover how wrong they were, Kylo gets angry and Rey just gets sad. Because Rey  _sees_ their mistake - sees that they both made the  _same_ mistake - and Kylo can’t see that at all. He can’t let go of his fantasy, but Rey can. That’s why he’s still reaching for her at the end and she doesn’t reach back.

What they really need is a story they can agree on. One that places neither of them at the center, and that doesn’t involve someone named Skywalker either saving or ruling the galaxy. And that’s a story neither of them can imagine just yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: it seems inevitable that this story will still somehow involve the legacy of Anakin Skywalker. I mean, it’s kinda obvious - they each fight so hard to claim his legacy for themselves that in the end it breaks in half. What they need to figure out, basically, is that Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader weren’t two separate people. Because both of them believe he was, in their own way. I dunno how much Rey knows about him, but if she did know his whole story, it would confirm her belief that the light and dark sides are things you turn to, not things that can coexist. The other thing they need to figure out is how to move past Anakin Skywalker and just…let him go. To really end the story TFA started, Rey and Kylo either have to put Anakin’s lightsaber back together or, more likely, just throw the pieces away. Then they need to get on the same page story-wise and, well, balance the goddamn Force.


	2. Rey’s and Kylo’s Two Stories

Okay okay here’s my big shipping prediction, and incidentally my Kylo redemption prediction, for Episode 9.

Obviously, we talk about shipping a lot, so the discussion often turns around whether the love between two characters will be platonic or romantic. But I don’t think the ST cares nearly as much about that as it cares about selfless love versus possessive love.

In TFA, Finn and Rey have what I think we can all agree is a beautiful friendship. But in TLJ, Rey goes off and has this intense, tumultuous  _thing_ with Kylo while Finn does his own thing elsewhere and meets a new friend/possible lover. Rey is full of feels for Kylo, but in the end she ditches him because he just wanted to own her, and finally she reunites with Finn, her real friend who only wants the best for her and she for him. Come on - their faces when they hug are so peaceful and blissful. Kylo may offer to relieve her loneliness in one way, but her bond with Finn is the one that actually makes her happy.

So here’s where Kylo redeeming himself comes in:

If Episode 9 is  _going_  to turn Kylo’s life around and not just kill him to rid us of this Skywalker monopoly on the story, he’ll need to accomplish one major thing: he’ll have to learn to love without needing to possess.

At present, he appears to care about one person (besides his family, who are rapidly dwindling), and that’s Rey. So if he does figure love out, it’ll undoubtedly be through his relationship with her.

Who does Rey love? Finn. Who does Kylo fucking  _hate?_ Finn.

Remember in ROTJ when Han brokenheartedly stepped aside because he thought Leia was in love with Luke? And remember in TLJ how Snoke told Kylo he had his “father’s heart”?

If Kylo works out his shit, I think he’ll demonstrate it by putting  _Finn_  ahead of himself. He’ll do it for Rey, but his decision will depend on recognizing that Finn is the better man.

I dunno if this ends with him winning Rey’s romantic love, because that would let him have his cake and eat it too. He should be choosing to  _stop trying to control her,_ for her own sake, with no expectation of anything in return.

None of this actually requires us to get into romantic vs. platonic love at all, though, whether we’re talking Kylo/Rey or Finn/Rey. That’s irrelevant. In fact, this might be a good reason for them to sideline that whole question, because it’s creepy when a guy decides who’s best for a girl. But Kylo can certainly say “you know what, Rey needs this friend and so I should make sure she gets to keep him” without that “you belong with him” bullshit you sometimes see.

Anyway:

Kylo and Finn themselves have major unfinished business. Finn represents literally everything Kylo holds in contempt, and in TFA, he did his best to kill Finn without remorse. Not only did Finn cause all his problems (as he sees it), but he considers Finn utterly worthless.  _Kylo_ is the mighty Force-wielding Skywalker and Finn is just nobody. He can’t even  _imagine_ why Rey might want to be around Finn and not him.

 _That’s_ the bullshit Kylo must overcome if he’s going to struggle his way out of the hell he’s made for himself and stop destroying everything good in the galaxy.

This dovetails with my “Finn becomes leader of the Resistance” theory, by the way. If Finn ends up as Kylo’s opposite political number, they’ll have grounds to confront each other again. Kylo can be all “are you fucking kidding me?  _you’re_ the one people want in charge?  _you’re_ going to put the galaxy right? you barely know what the Force is! you have no larger destiny - you’re a stormtrooper, you were raised in a lab, you don’t even have a real  _name!”_ etc. etc.

If Kylo can learn to respect Finn, both as his own man and as Rey’s friend, he can get past all his bullshit at once. And  _Star Wars,_ as we know, loves to do those single, transformative moments. It’s moving, and it’s also efficient storytelling.

Observe: if Kylo accepts that Finn is better than him, 1) he gives up his “Force-users are better and should rule the universe” thing, 2) he gives up his “the Force is only for Skywalkers and maybe the girl I like” thing, because as we now know, the Force is for everybody, and that very possibly includes Finn, 3) he gives up his need to control and possess the people he loves, and 4) he gives up his “everything is about me and my feelings” thing. In short, he gives up his whole distorted vision of the past and lets someone who represents the future take over.

Let’s be honest - he already suspects Rey is better than him. But  _Finn,_ Finn will be the real challenge.

I’ve been saying since TFA that if Kylo redeems himself, Rey  _and_ Finn will both play a role in that. This is how I think, in part, the filmmakers might do that. TFA made Finn and Rey dual protagonists opposed to one antagonist for a reason. 

(Obviously I’m coming at this from a Kylo-centric perspective, but nothing I’m saying is predicated on Kylo being “the main character.” Finn and Rey will carry the overall storyline, their arcs will intersect with Kylo’s, and Kylo will either get on board with them or he won’t. They can be catalysts for his change without the story needing to be primarily about him.)

One final word about romantic vs. platonic love: I do think it could matter that Kylo’s love for Rey, at least, be romantic, because Kylo’s real task is to untie the knot Anakin tied. His job in the story, I think, will be to bring Anakin’s  _whole_  story into the clear light of day and then, in some sense, to unwrite it - to put Anakin’s legacy to rest. To put that tragic Skywalker past behind him and behind us. And a big part of that past is Anakin’s possessive (romantic) love for Padme. So he might need to  _love_ -love Rey and yet learn to stop grasping at her if he’s going to unwrite that chapter of Anakin’s history.

Will she end up  _love_ -loving him back? She might! The filmmakers just have to avoid that trope of “rewarding” him for his good behavior by giving him the girl. And actually, that’s easy - just reward Rey for her heroism by giving her the guy. After all,  _she’s_ the protagonist here, not him. And it would be lovely if, in the end, Rey gets to keep  _both_ of these people she cares about.


	3. The Trouble With Kylo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A refinement of my claims in chapter two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to cracktheglasses for many of these ideas.

As my friend cracktheglasses pointed out, I glossed over big parts of Kylo’s character when I said he only knows how to love “possessively.” Forgive me, I was unclear. I don’t think he’s just some self-centered psychopath who sees other people as objects and obeys nothing but his own desires. How could he do that? He has no idea  _what_ he desires or who he even is. Here’s how I see him by the end of TLJ. I dunno if I’m right but it’s what I thought the movie was  _trying_  to say, successfully or not:

 **1) Kylo’s galaxy-consuming self-aggrandizement is oddly not about him** _ **.**  _It’s all centered on this fantasy of the great Skywalker legacy, which is all he thinks could give him or anyone else value. So he’s full of selfish rage and need and hunger but also seems to live in a state of self-denial. He wants to rule the galaxy (whatever that means), but only because that’s what the descendent of Darth Vader oughtto do or else he might as well be nothing. To satisfy this one desire, he sacrifices any other desires he has and subjects himself to pointless suffering.

 **2) Kylo does, however, secretly want to love and be loved.** But he doesn’t seem to know how to love people while remaining distinct from them. Which you can understand, given that his major relationship has been with Snoke, who demanded that Kylo forfeit his entire life to him. Snoke makes it clear that “love” (or whatever he calls it) means annihilating yourself and putting the other person’s will in place of yours. When Kylo first starts talking to Rey, that’s his working model for “love.”

 **3) Snoke has presumably been teaching him this lesson about love from the beginning.** It goes all the way back to his infancy, and for some reason, his family couldn’t counterbalance whatever shaping effect Snoke was having on his personality. I wish we had  _any_ idea what his relationship with his parents was like, but we knowhe doesn’t hate them. It’s pretty clear he in fact loves them. And yet, whether it’s for Snoke reasons or otherwise, he doesn’t believe there can be any middle ground with them. His parents either love him or they’re dead to him. He’s either everything or he’s nothing to them.

And like…I’m not even gonna get into whether what happens between him and Luke makes any sense psychologically, for either of them, but the movie seems to  _want_ to say that Ben’s family gave him a  _reason_ for having this very black-and-white picture of love that wasn’t just “Snoke taught me.” I mean, what are you supposed to think when your uncle, your flesh and blood, responds to his suspicions that you’re headed for trouble by looming over you in your sleep with an ignited lightsaber? That’s pretty all-or-nothing. I mean, it’s ridiculous, writing-wise, but the movie is trying to tell us that Ben didn’t  _make_ himself this way. He wasn’t born this way, he isn’t just missing some essential component of his humanity. Things  _happened_ to him.

So like, it’s not his fault. But that doesn’t matter, because everyone has to cope with their own shit whether someone else dumped it on them or not. The movies seem to be advancing him through a growing awareness of how messed up he’s really gotten. He’s still close to the beginning, in that stage when you barely even know what’s wrong, barely even see that this isn’t just how things are and that there are other ways to exist. I think TLJ wants to show him taking a tentative step in that direction. He has the  _potential_ to heal himself because he’s capable of love, no matter how stunted it starts out.

 **4) That’s what I found moving about his offer to Rey: it’s so innocent, in a way.**  He has  _no idea_ why she wouldn’t join him if she cared about him at all. Isn’t love just this claustrophobic bubble in which two people escape the pain of the world by abandoning all other relationships past present and future and thinking of nothing but each other? Doesn’t love mean nothing else has to matter?

After Snoke reveals just how little he cares about him, Kylo starts talking to Rey, and it gives him this new insight into love: that it doesn’t have to destroyhim, that it can feel good and safe and the oppositeof loneliness, not just another kind of loneliness. But he sees this and he stilldoesn’t understand. He can only imagine their love as a less painful version of what Snoke had offered him—better, more equal and reciprocal, but still without boundaries, without true autonomy for either of them.  _We will want the exact same things and never need anybody else_ , he thinks.  _It’ll be amazing_. He’s not hopelessly psychopathic, he just has no sense of self and thus no sense of other people’s selves as separate from his own. 

 **5) So that’s what I meant by him loving “possessively,” I guess.** My point wasn’t that he’s a misogynist who wants to own his girlfriend. He just thinks love means replacing yourself with the other person, putting them at the center of your world and depending on them utterly. He’s willing to do this for Rey and he expects her to do it for him. He’s like, “throw away your whole life to be with me!” and then he says “please,” like he’ll die if she says no. He’s intensely lonely, he wants a friend, but he can only imagine that friend keeping him company up in the high prison of disconnection and isolation where he’s been sitting for years. That place where total selfishness and total self-annihilation become indistinguishable—that’s where Kylo lives. And he doesn’t yet know that other places exist.

In relation to Anakin, Pablo Hidalgo tweeted about “attachment” a while back, and his interpretation was that it’s not just love—the Jedi don’t  _hate love—_ it’s the kind of love you cling to and try to control instead of just accepting that the other person and the world itself won’t always give you what you want. It’s a fear of losing a person that’s so intense you’ll do anything to prevent it, even hurting that person. Kylo doesn’t currently know how to love without attachment. But he could learn.

 **6) So, Kylo doesn’t know how to be his own person yet, so he can’t treat other people as such.** But what’s great is, when you let a person you love be their own person,  _you_ get to be your own person too. When you understand that their desires can be different from yours and they can still love you,  _you_ become more whole. Rey did give him  _some_ kind of glimpse at this other option, a new way of relating to people that he’s never tried before or had forgotten about until now. That is what  _happened_ to him during TLJ, and the movie wants to show that it changed him, even just a little bit, and even though he still seems stranded on the beach of his own galaxy-destroying despair at the moment. If he’s alone for a while, maybe he’ll figure out who he is when all these other minds aren’t crammed up inside his. He can learn what he actually thinks and feels, and make real choices of his own. Of course he may destroy the galaxy first. The stakes are always unusually high in  _Star Wars_.

By the way, I think Rey went through her own process of discovering this too. She spent the movie trying to figure out who she is, and by the end, she knows. She knows that she too holds onto people, and that she tried to bend Kylo (and Luke) to what she wanted and her sense of how the world should be, which made her miss what was really going on with Kylo. But she has the advantage of all these other relationships. When she shuts the door on Kylo, I don’t think she’s “rejecting” him for ever and ever, I think she’s drawing a boundary. At present, he can’t be who she needs and she can’t be who he needs and so they have to part for a while. But all he’s thinking is, “well, I’ve been abandoned again.” They’re still talking past each other. It’s sad, but it’s not the end.


	4. Addendum: Kylo and Leia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Follow-up to chapters two and three that takes Leia into account.

The last two chapters completely left out someone equally critical to any possible redemption for Kylo:

Lucasfilm has said that Leia was meant to be central to Episode 9. TFA was Han’s movie, TLJ was Luke’s, and Episode 9 was supposed to be Leia’s. And now she won’t be in it at all. Which really breaks my heart. But I  _do_ think the filmmakers will find a way to keep her central to Kylo’s storyline, at least, and let her contribute to his eventual turn-around, if he manages one. And I think this will relate largely to Anakin/Vader.

You’ll remember in ROTJ (and this has been mentioned in the recent tie-in novels too) that Luke may have worked out most of his issues with his father, but Leia never did. In fact, Leia’s  _fear_ that the ghost of Darth Vader will return to possess her son figures prominently into Ben’s fall, since it’s why she sends him away to Luke. We also learn in one of the recent novels that  _she never told Ben_ who his grandfather was, leaving him to find out along with the rest of the galaxy. So basically, by suppressing this huge tragedy in their family’s history, Leia made it possible for Ben to stumble upon and completely misinterpret that tragedy, and then to compulsively repeat everything that made Anakin’s life so destructive. So Leia’s avoidance of her connection to Vader really  _does_ make him come back and destroy their lives all over again.

This all suggests to me that in Episode 9, Leia will somehow be the one to help Kylo understand who Anakin really was, and thus how, exactly, things in their family got so fucked up. Letting go of his warped picture of Vader and letting go of his anger at his family will somehow go hand in hand - because, after all, once he believed his family had truly rejected him, Kylo cut them out of his history and replaced them with a fantasy of Vader, in fine “you’re not my real dad!” style. His whole life after that is based on imitating a man he doesn’t ultimately know much about - or only knows the official story about, not the more intimate and nuanced family story that Leia chose not to tell him because she’d barely even processed it herself.

So if Kylo’s gonna make it, he inevitably has to discover the full truth about Vader. And I don’t know how they’re going to do this, but the most beautiful and elegant story choice, in my opinion, would be for him to learn that truth from Leia, or through Leia, somehow. So they can  _both_ put Vader to rest.

But she won’t be there in person. So I’m curious: how do you think the filmmakers might do this?


	5. A Serpent's Egg

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few last thoughts about Kylo's character so far.

Kylo/Ben’s storyline puzzles me in one major way. Long before he ever destroys Luke’s new Jedi Order, everyone was worried that there was “darkness in him.” But we never hear exactly why.

In TFA, Han and Leia have a (necessarily) vague conversation about the causes of Ben’s fall. Leia tells Han, “it was Snoke. He seduced our son to the dark side.” So whatever Leia detected in Ben that made her worry, she at least explains it to herself later as the result of Snoke’s influence. Han just says “there was too much Vader in him.” So Han thinks it’s genetics and Leia thinks he got it from the creep down the street, but neither of them talk about any cause within  _Ben himself._

Luke in TLJ gives us more specifics. Apologies for not remembering the exact quote, but he says something like, “I had sensed the darkness growing within him and seen glimpses of it in moments during his training, but when I looked inside his mind, it was worse than I had ever imagined.“ Still, though, that’s super vague. Like, did Ben  _do_ fucked-up things? Or was Luke  _sensing_ a darkness that he got a better look at when Ben was asleep? And by the way, what  _does_ Luke see when he looks into Ben’s sleeping mind? We hear chaos and screaming - is that what’s going on in there  _in the_ _present moment?_ Are these Ben’s fantasies of destruction? Or, as Luke’s actual dialogue suggests when he fears that Ben is going to destroy everything he loves, is he just seeing a vision of what Ben is  _going_ to do, all the destruction he’s  _going_ to cause?

In  _Aftermath: Empire’s End,_ Leia senses Ben’s spirit when he’s in her womb: “He is less a human-shaped thing and more a pulsing, living band of light. Light that sometimes dims, that sometimes is thrust through with a vein of darkness.“ Luke tells her that this darkness is normal, that we all have it, but Leia worries anyway. She worries about what will  _happen_  to this child she’s bringing into an unstable galaxy.

My point is: whenever Ben’s family worries about the darkness in him, they either express it in metaphorical light/dark terms, or _purely_ _as anxiety about the future,_ a fear of what Ben  _could_ or  _might_ do. We hear almost nothing about what he’s like as a person  _at that moment._

In the TFA novelization, Leia says a bit more to Han: that Ben was “born with an equal potential for good or evil.” But isn’t everybody? It’s only critical for Ben because he’s so powerful and his good or bad choices could majorly affect the galaxy. But still, nobody describes his character traits before he falls, they only talk about his futurity.

This must be on purpose, because the sequel trilogy (picking up from the prequels) makes a big deal about the dangers of predicting or even just anticipating the future. Kylo and Rey see each other’s futures and get everything about each other wrong. Luke, after getting a glimpse of Ben’s future, does the exact thing that will make that future happen. The tie-in novels imply that Leia’s  _worry_ about Ben’s darkness might actually make it  _worse._ So we’re urged to conclude that everyone’s  _fears_ that Ben might turn dark in fact  _helped_ turn him dark. If you don’t accept the dark side, you give it more power. And you alienate your kid.

But it’s frustrating, because Ben  _before_  his fall is just this black box. It’s like he doesn’t really exist, except as pure potential, until he takes that definitive step and becomes Kylo Ren. We’re told that from the beginning, he was equally “light” and “dark,” but the Force is just a metaphor for a person’s character. In the prequel trilogy, we  _saw_ the flaws in Anakin’s character that led him to the dark side. We saw in fact how his  _good_ qualities exacerbated his bad ones. We saw the struggle of “light” and “dark” play out in the dynamics of an individual personality. But with Ben, that’s all hidden from us. It’s all buried in a past we’re never shown.

Now, you  _could_ say he was just a good kid influenced by an evil external power. But that’s…not very satisfying. So what, if we took Snoke out of the equation, Ben would have turned out just fine? The conflict of light with dark isn’t nearly as interesting if it doesn’t emerge from Ben’s own character. Anakin is critically influenced by Palpatine, but Palpatine needed something to work with that was already there, and the story  _tells_ uswhat that was. Snoke is an evil predator, certainly, but because  _Star Wars_  is an allegorical fairy tale, he must also represent something internal to Ben. What in  _Ben himself_ was dark, and how did it manifest itself? We can speculate, but it’s almost as if the story deliberately hides the sorts of specifics that would let us understand him as a real person.

I guess what I’m asking is: where does the sequel trilogy think evil comes from?

* * *

Regarding Ben’s character, the tie-in novels do give us a few hints to work with, something in the nature of a strength that can also be a flaw, as we saw with Anakin:

In  _Bloodline,_  Leia remembers him as a child: ”[Another kid’s] expression reminded her a little bit of Ben’s when he was little, running in after an afternoon of roughhousing with his friends, hair mussed, absolutely filthy, and proud of himself.” He’s a normal, happy, rambunctious, confident child. Even more critically, in  _Aftermath: Life Debt,_ we hear how Leia sensed Ben’s budding little personality in her womb, and the person he’s  _going_ to become: “…she is suddenly aware of her child’s mind and spirit: she senses pluck and wit and steel blood and a keen mind and by the blood of Alderaan is this one going to be a fighter!”

So that’s the tiny bit we get about Ben’s character, as little as we’re shown of what he used to be like: he has an incredibly strong will. He’s a fighter.  _That_ is the grain of information that suggests who he was, who he is and who he’ll eventually be. He got into this mess by fighting, and he might get out by fighting as well. It all depends on what he’s fighting for.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Hausofodin for helping me remember that Luke quote.

**Author's Note:**

> This meta was originally posted on Tumblr, but I'm posting it here to make sure it's preserved.


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